Marketing 101 – Saturation

Marketing Saturation is how exposed a consumer is to your messaging and likely to ignore it.

“Stand out, without sticking out.” – Friend

The important concept behind marketing saturation is entropy. Entropy is the phenomenon of natural decay or a decline over time. Just like in marketing, all of the business activities will slowly perform worse and worse, on average. Usually saturation follows a normal distribution; once it hits its peak it undergoes an entropy and will constantly decline. The more frequently someone is hit with the same message, after a point, it will preform worse and worse.

Gaussian graph of a normal distribution with standard deviations

Think of saturation as the great unifying force within marketing that forces new and inventive methods to reach new customers. Everyone deals with saturation including your competition, it’s a healthy and good phenomenon. Advertisements are often measuring this with the frequency metric. Frequencies above 2 indicate that ‘on average’ someone has seen your message at least twice, and so on.

The obstacle you will inevitably face is what to do about marketing saturation??? My answer will always be the same… innovate! Innovation is the cure, creating new and interesting content, that’s how you continue to thrive and do it better than your competition. You can always add new reach and a new audience to the message but at some point there will be a finite audience to show your message to.

How do you innovate?

There are plenty of articles online to read to discover how to make something new. You can start by asking your team, your customers, or looking at your competitors for new ideas. If your biggest problem is coming up with new messaging then you should realize… that’s amazing! Saturation for some industries is more difficult to overcome because there are only a small number of quality customers and everyone is fighting for them. As competition increases – saturation is a very real and tough issue to solve. You are trying to stand out in a big pond.

Cultivating creativity:

Not to steal from the many TedTalks here, but fostering creativity is a lifestyle and work environment dilemma. Risk is the natural enemy, it does not want you to innovate, and risk does not want you to spend money without guarantees. You bring out creativity by allowing for risk: learn from failure, fail fast and take notes, then reward your successes and keep going.

TedTalk video on increasing creativity and innovation.

Kevin Dieny

Marketing Professional

You want to change your message enough each time that all your hard work does not fall prey to saturation’s entropic affects. You need each marketing message to have enough of a difference to be unique but not altogether off-key. You should build out a calendar of how often you will develop new content and messaging so you can plan ahead.

If you are hitting the wall and struggling with recapturing the success of the past it’s likely that you need a new message. Working hard in the modern workplace is all about being efficient with your time and energy in a way that allows for creativity and innovation without too much added risk.

The important concept behind marketing saturation is entropy. Entropy is the phenomenon of natural decay or a decline over time. Just like in marketing, all of the business activities will slowly perform worse and worse, on average. Usually saturation follows a normal distribution; once it hits its peak it undergoes an entropy and will constantly decline. The more frequently someone is hit with the same message, after a point, it will preform worse and worse.